Five years ago the conversation went like this: the family bought the primary residence in Miami through a brokerage, the holiday villa in Saint-Barth through a different brokerage, and the seasonal rental in Aspen through a third. The concierge — the person who programmed the trips, booked the restaurants, handled the year-round logistics — was a fourth name. The four operations did not speak to each other, and the client paid four sets of fees for what was, in honesty, the same job. That model has collapsed.
The role that has replaced it is the one I now occupy with a small number of families, and that a handful of colleagues across the market are beginning to occupy with theirs. The agent-concierge handles the property transaction, the rental programme between use, the staffing of the house, the seasonal opening and closing, the integration with the family's other residences, and the bookings — restaurants, boats, schools, doctors — when the family is in residence. The transaction is no longer a discrete event. It is the entry point into a multi-decade operating relationship.
The reasons the model has consolidated are economic and structural. The fee compression on pure real estate transactions has pushed serious agents to look for recurring revenue. The complexity of running a four-residence family — Miami, the Hamptons, Aspen, Saint-Barth — exceeds what any individual EA can coordinate. And the client, by the time the fourth property is acquired, has learned that the friction is not in the buying. The friction is in the running. The agent who can make that friction disappear earns the next acquisition without competing for it.
What the role requires is unusual. The agent must understand the market well enough to transact, the staff economy of each market well enough to hire, the calendar of the family well enough to anticipate, and the discretion to handle all three without leaking any of it. The natural cross-over from the concierge side is faster than the cross-over from the brokerage side; a concierge who has spent five years watching how UHNW families actually use their houses understands the buying decision better than the agent who has only ever closed it.
The model is in its early years. The contracts are still being written. But the trajectory is clear: the family with four residences will, within the decade, transact and operate all four through a single relationship. The brokerage that has not built a concierge arm by 2028 will lose the multi-residence client. The concierge who cannot transact will lose the residence client to the agent next door. The two jobs are merging because the client wants them to. The clients I work with told me so.
— Camille Vedy
